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Gentle reader; you know my grammatical ways by now - highly knowledgeable about correct applications and strongly in favour of fierce correction of all mistakes (except when I get something wrong, at which point prescriptivism becomes pointless and correction becomes negative reinforcement of meaningless rules / language is ever-changing / people should be encouraged to express themselves how they want blah blah blah.)
Last night, in written conversation with an esteemed colleague, I decided to use “to wikipedia” as a verb; a fairly common occurrence, in much the same way as “to google” has entered the language. But I needed to use it in the past tense, and was somewhat stumped; “wikipediad”? Looks too much like “Olympiad”, and therefore as if it should signify a worldwide competition for shoddy editing or something. “Wikipedia’d”, then? Surely that’s far worse than any of the apostrophe-based mistake’s you see every day. In the end, I went with “made reference to a popular encyclopaedic website whose editorial and funding practices are somewhat controversial” - but there MUST be a more succinct way of putting it.
Maybe you clever blogosphere types with your computers, jobs, wide range of knowledge and different experiences of life can help me… I’ll put it to a poll.
This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 9:20 am and is filed under Grammar, Ha flipping ha., Poll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
Why not just use ‘Wikied’?
Or Wikipedied?
Nice try, but the former looks too much like “Wicked” as might have been articulated by you or I in our mis-spent Ipswich youth (e.g. “the new Kajagoogoo single is WELL wikied!”); the latter should obviously mean a premature announcement of death on the site (e.g. Ted Kennedy “wikipidied” on Jan 20th this year).
Perhaps - but I’d pronounce it ‘wikipeedeed’ and I think that would be alright.
Obviously, Taf, one would use the Latin perfect suffix for verbs derived from first-declension nouns (which is what ‘pedia’ is, n’est-ce pas?), namely -vi, and so the correct conjugation would be “I wikipediavi it”. I mean, really. What do they teach English Lit students at Oxford these days?
I also hope that I don’t need to point out that, by extension, that tomorrow you will wikipediabas, and that before writing this post, you had wikipediaveras.
Sometimes restructuring for called a sentence is.
That’s an idea, Cane, and some contemplate it I gave it; but sounding a bit like Yoda I ended up.
I have to disagree with Elzee here: “wikipedia” as verb is clearly a derivative of “paideuo” which, while neatly regular itself, should be conjugated after a Greek fashion. So your simple past would be “wikepaideusa”, and if you wanted a full-blown perfect you’d have to say “wikipepaideuka”. Now, it goes without saying that if you have been on the receiving end of some wikipedia-ing, you should try “wikipepaideumai” for size.
Of course, Greeks of the classical period (and beyond) did (do) not have a letter “w”, which would logically make this word pre-classical/archaic, so my elision in “wikepaideusa” may be inappropriate and “wikiepaideusa” may be preferred (with a diairesis on the first “e”).
There’s also a strong case for replacing all the active parts I quoted with middle voice ones, but that would just be pedantic.
The problem with “wikepaideusa”, is every time you remove an article, two more are added.
I’m way out of my league here.
Thanks Duncanesque. Even if I can’t pronounce and am unlikely to be able to remember “wikipaideusa”, at least it might give Jimmy Wales an idea for his site’s North American funding issues.
Damn. My GCSE in Latin doesn’t quite beat a Masters in Classics, does it? I was Queen of the Conjugation of Dead Languages around here until you showed up.